Five years ago Régis Debray published an article in Le Monde diplomatique entitled 'What Is Mediology?' His aim was to open up a notion he'd introduced in passing twenty years earlier. Neither a science nor a sociology of the media, mediology, Debray explained, is a discipline of the in-between (l'entre-deux): a study of the interactions between technology and culture, between the higher modes of human activity - religion, discursive thought, art - and the lower: transmission, documentation and material production.

LRB 17 February 2005 | PDF Download